 Welcome to today's Barnes Takeout. My name is Amy Gillette. I'm a collections researcher at the Barnes, and today we're going to look at this sculpture, a large wooden sculpture of a seated female figure made by the Sinufo people of West Africa around the late 19th to early 20th century. And so looking at the sculpture, what we see, let's zoom in a bit. We see a bowl. And we can see the smooth wood of the exterior. It's a bit more roughly hewn on the interior, resting on the head of a female figure, a woman that's very elegantly abstracted into this kind of heart shape. We can see she's got closed eyes, some scarification on the sides of her face that carries over into her arms onto her breasts, a bit on her belly as well. We can see that she's kind of grasping her belly with her hands here. And we can see as well that she's seated on a stool. Her back leg, but actually her own legs are serving us as the front legs. Now, let's take a look from the side. And so from here, we can see that her belly does protrude a bit. And again, we can see a little bit better the way in which her legs are operating as those of the stool. And again, we can see her from the other side to get a sense of the almost architectonic sculptural dimensions of this work of art. And again, see just how, I guess, erect her breasts are and how swollen her belly is, suggesting that this is an object that is maybe making her look like she's pregnant may have to do with fertility. And so what we know about this particular object is that it was something associated with the Sandogo society within the sinful people to which most women and a very few select men would belong. And the Sandogo society were involved with divination. They practiced an animistic religion and divination would be a kind of mediation between this world and the spiritual one in order to help people give advice to solve problems. And they were also involved with ensuring the matrilineal purity of their society and sculptures like this with the balls on top of their head and their monumental size seem to have been involved in a ceremony that would take place in November or December at the end of the harvest season where the women belonging to the society would bring their sculptures into the courtyard of the most important elder women within the society. And they would use the bowls for mixing the harvested shea butter, which is something else that the women were responsible for. And it was associated with making good nutritious meals with smoothing their own skin as well as the skin of their infants. And they could use these sculptures as a way of calling down calling down the spirit world and for for singing the most important songs of the society and men in general were not supposed to see these sculptures and when this ceremony took place at the end of the harvest season in fact men were not even allowed to go anywhere near near the courtyard of the house of the place where it was held. And so when I first learned this it actually made me wonder if the women themselves did carve these statues but it seems that what they would do would be to commission them from from other other tribes of the Sanufo people and so it would really be only the men in their own particular group that wouldn't be seeing these statues. And so having gotten some of the historical context for this object, let's go ahead and look at where it is at the barns. So here it is in the central vitrine of room 21 at the barns foundation, which gives you a sense of its pretty monumental size. This is a gallery that has further masks sculpture in the round from different peoples in West Africa. There are modern paintings by figures like Edward Manet, Mauricio Trio, Amadeo Modigliani, there are decorative objects like hinges and irons chairs the spit that's on top of the vitrine. And as you may know, Albert Barnes would create displays like this as a way of asking people to find formal continuities between different types of art made at different periods and places all around the world. And so with that I see maybe for example, if we look at the arch of the woman's arm here of the female figures arm, we might see a kind of resonance in the arch of the flying buttress in this image of the cathedral or in this iron spit up here. And then if we look over to this portrait by Modigliani, you might notice the pretty abstracted heart shaped face and he and many other artists in Paris when a lot of sculpture from the West Africa had been brought there really as a result of the French colonial rubber trade. They modern French artists emulated the shapes of the sculpture to tap into what they understood as its expressive power. Another another connection that I see is in some of the medieval objects like this one over here and let's go ahead and pivot to our right. This is an image of Christ carrying the cross. This is something else that in the Middle Ages would also have helped people to kind of mediate between this world and the spiritual one to stir up emotions at the suffering of Christ in order to achieve a kind of mystical union and it apparently worked to the extent that on some of the antagonists of Christ. People gouged out some of their faces so like this new for women and other objects, it was functional a kind of power object that mediated between the celestial and sublunary. And I think it's important to remember that Dr Barnes set up these formal as well as conceptual connections in these galleries. Nearly 100 years ago with what was then a really progressive idea that great art is great art, no matter what kind of object it was when it was made, where it was made, hoping that people would see the greatness of human achievement and power of aesthetic engagement throughout. And it's a legacy that I hope very much we make good on today. Thank you so much for joining. That's it for today's Takeout.